Author Archives: ditesh

Climbing Mount Everest

I’ve been fascinated by Mount Everest and the mountaineers that pit themselves against it for a number of years now. Thanks to the Internet, I follow blog posts by those who have receive first hand information of the latest in … Continue reading

Posted in Mount Everest, Mountaineering | Leave a comment

Catching uncaught exceptions in Node.js

A common problem when writing Node.js servers is in ensuring all exceptions are handled. Node.js will helpfully die when exceptions are not caught and handled, which forces you, the author, to ensure robustness in your Node.js applications. There is a … Continue reading

Posted in Code, Node.js | Leave a comment

Going all Jain on Hemant

The post by Hemant Mehta on Jainism is a slightly shocking read. There are a number of factual inaccuracies and drive-by innuendos. Let’s look at the article one piece at a time. First up – Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins … Continue reading

Posted in Jainism | 1 Comment

Killing connections

When working with remote services (eg Twitter stream), it’s important to test out and handle all (if not, as many as possible) edge cases. Examples of edge cases include transient network errors, unexpected disconnections to long lived streams, temporary routing … Continue reading

Posted in Technology | Leave a comment

PAM authentication for fun and profit

PAM is a pluggable authentication and authorization library for *nix based systems – think Linux, FreeBSD and even Mac OS X. Logging into your machine or a remote POP3 server or even certain web based applications, and your authentication credentials … Continue reading

Posted in C, Code, Node.js, Technology | Leave a comment

Auto web account creation for lazy bunts

I sign up regularly on new web apps. Invariably, the sign up process requires certain standard data: email, username and password, at the very least. Typing this information in over and over again becomes tiring at some point. Expecting organizations … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Group Buying for the Masses

The online group-buying model is turning out to be big business. In 2010, the most popular group-buying site, GroupOn.com, made USD$713 million in worldwide revenues and in 2011, revenues are estimated to be on the scale of USD$3-4 billion. In … Continue reading

Posted in Business, Malaysia, Technology | Leave a comment

Driving Miss Daisy

I was driving home yesterday and almost got into an accident. It was a t-junction and I was driving up north the long end of t he T. As I was approaching the junction, I noticed that a car was … Continue reading

Posted in Malaysia, We can do better | Leave a comment

Landscapes in 1080p

Lovely view from space. Be sure to set it to 1080p.

Posted in Science, Space | Leave a comment

What’s in a CNAME?

In a bid to make payment for Unifi, I tried accessing the site at unifi.my. Chrome informed me that DNS resolution for unifi.my had failed. I ran a quick test: [ditesh@rhea] dig A unifi.my   ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;unifi.my. IN … Continue reading

Posted in Malaysia, Technology, We can do better | Leave a comment